OPINION: Administrators organize protest against faculty guest speaker

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You’ve probably heard about the pro-Hamas tent camps occupying many North American campuses, including at the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia.

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Do you wonder why they persist and why students face few consequences? It’s because many university administrators are woke: they are proponents of the oppressor-oppressed framework and the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) cult. Woke administrators are damaging universities and need to be stopped.

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I want to tell you about a recent repressive action taken by woke administrators at Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU), but first, some background. WLU has a woke problem, which became evident in 2017 with the Lindsay Shepherd affair. In 2018, Shepherd’s student group invited professor Frances Widdowson to speak about whether university indigenization threatens open enquiry. The week before, the university instituted a new security fee policy and charged Shepherd $5,000, which she crowd-funded. In addition, the university organized a competing event at the same time as Widdowson’s speech. In essence, the administration tried to cancel Shepherd’s event because they disagreed with her speaker’s views.

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In a parallel to their treatment of Widdowson, last month the DEI administration organized a protest against a speaker invited by Laurier’s local chapter of the Heterodox Academy (HxA). HxA is anathema to DEI, because its mandate is to advance open enquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement.

In March, Laurier HxA invited lawyer Lisa Bildy to talk about restrictions on free speech imposed on Canadian professionals by their regulators. One of Bildy’s clients is B.C. nurse Amy Hamm, who is a sex-based rights supporter. She has been subjected to more than three years of disciplinary persecution since supporting a “I love JK Rowling” billboard in Vancouver.

We immediately encountered institutional resistance. We asked to advertise the speech on a university web page which has been used to promote events like the “ECO-Feels: Navigating Climate Emotions Together” space. We were told that we didn’t qualify. After pointing out contrary examples, they relented. Coincidentally, our advertisement quickly fell off the main page as an extraordinary number of new events were advertised after ours.

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In another coincidence, when we tried to advertise our next event, we discovered that the senior administration had changed the advertising rules. In an overdue move, they decided to restrict advertisements to academic news only.

On the day of Bildy’s speech, there was a small protest, flying the pride flag (amongst others), which was attended by students, faculty and administrators, particularly the AVP of DEI. The protest featured slogans like “Hate speech is not free speech” and “Bigotry is not professional.” From the flag and the slogans, it was clear that the protest was misdirected — they were protesting Amy Hamm’s views and not our guest speaker.

Since a protest is a form of speech, we didn’t object. However, in the weeks following, the media reported that the protest had been partly organized by the office of the AVP of DEI. We reached out for confirmation from the president but she didn’treply. Let that sink in: The university administration organized a protest against a speaker invited by its own faculty.

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The squelching of views by the administration is a serious problem. It violates the Wilfrid Laurier Act, which states that the university’s object is: education “in a spirit of free enquiry.” It also violates the principle of institutional neutrality, which is the idea that public institutions of education be non-partisan. The promotion of one side of a contentious social debate interferes with the academic freedom of students and faculty to pursue their own enquiry into the issue. The neutrality principle also respects the fact that public universities are funded by taxpayers of diverse political views.

An administration which inhibits the learning process of its students and faculty has lost the plot. It is no longer abiding by its legislative object and its duty to taxpayers. The board of governors needs to depoliticize the Laurier senior administration and, if it doesn’t, it is derelict in its fiduciary duty and should resign.

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The province, which regulates the universities, has also failed. It has been negligent in its oversight while the DEI cancer has infected universities with poisons like discriminatory hiring, segregation and ideological indoctrination. A good first step in fixing the universities has been proposed by Chistopher Rufo at the Manhattan Institute: Bar all spending on DEI by university administrations. DEI must be removed root and branch. It is not compatible with the truth-seeking object of a university, and it is the source of the many problems (e.g., anti-Semitism) visible on university campuses today.

-William McNally Ph.D. is a Professor of finance at Wilfrid Laurier University. He researches stock buybacks, is a textbook author and is co-director of the Laurier Student Investment Fund.

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